SPEAKER_03: Let's talk about the sweaters. Okay, let David, let's start with you because I love it. I love David. I love that. I decided to up my sweater game for Jamaa. This is I love it.
SPEAKER_03: Tom Ford, Tom Ford, the buttons are made out of endangered rhino
SPEAKER_01: horn.
SPEAKER_03: We just lost a third of the audience. So my sweater is a very light Italian cashmere made by a company called Dori Ani Dori Ani cashmere. This plugs for our start up. We're monetizing the all in pod. Yeah, we got our cashmere just got this right
SPEAKER_03: here. This right here is a young calf leather. Very soft, very soft. And the buttons, like David's are made from shark fin.
SPEAKER_02: For those of you at home who would like to spend $150 and stay warm, may I recommend the marine layer? You can find it on Union Street jacket. I mean, how you can also find that
SPEAKER_03: jacket on Tert Street.
SPEAKER_04: Sweater Karen listening to this sweater Karen, if you're
SPEAKER_03: listening,
SPEAKER_04: never reveal sweater Karen got back to me and she was like, Oh
SPEAKER_02: my god, he's so delted. I think I know who she is sweater Karen
SPEAKER_03: can kiss my brown ass. Oh, so I Jade comes home last night. I
SPEAKER_04: kid you not. She's like, I don't like you in the t shirts. I got you some sweaters and I was you know, we're going to the mountains for the for the holiday and I was like, did you watch the podcast about the sweater? She's like, No, I don't listen to your podcast. I was like, Okay, fair enough. And I'm like, I'm looking at these things are on these boxes and just got this bunch of sweaters. I started I was like, What did you spend on this? She said $3,000 I was like, I'm not comfortable spending $3,000 on a sweater. That's half a sweater, eight of them.
SPEAKER_01: It's your mouth is like is that a sleeve?
SPEAKER_03: That's four buttons and a waistband. That might be a vest for tomorrow. I think that's the
SPEAKER_04: boxes. So I came in with 3000. So I got my three quarter and I'm feeling good. I'm feeling really good. I feel pretty sexy and I'll be honest.
SPEAKER_03: Rain Man David said we open source it to the fans and they've just gone crazy.
SPEAKER_04: Hey everybody. Hey everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Yes. breaking into the top 50 podcast week after week because of you the amazing audience telling your friends it's been two weeks so it's weekend week.
SPEAKER_02: We said week after week, week in a week. Week after week, a week and a week.
SPEAKER_04: The top 40 podcast episodes in the world. Thanks to the fans with me, of course, the dictator himself in a amazing sweater, light light cash merge. They
SPEAKER_03: have science I found out from his mom. She much prefers the
SPEAKER_04: Sultan of Science to Queen of Kenwa. So that's where we're going with going forward. David freeburg, who had a great party up in and I really enjoyed going and sacks who didn't go to beeps party or freeburg party. He stayed home and played chess on his iPhone. The rain man himself David sacks. Welcome to the pot everybody. Okay, you want my two New York story one true bestie
SPEAKER_02: Jason Calacanis. I really wanted to come but that's breastfeeding and so I
SPEAKER_03: couldn't come. The helipad was shut down. She might couldn't land you're
SPEAKER_02: getting breastfed. There was a curvy or enthused Oh no, it was
SPEAKER_04: this great show called afterlife from Ricky Gervais. There's literally a scene in it where a woman they work for a local newspaper that's going out of business and they're going to do local stories. And the big story in town is a woman is making pudding. Incredibly delicious pudding and it's from her breast milk. And they go and cover the story. Anyway, I'll just leave it at that. It's pretty amazing story. Do you want to know my two New York stories or not?
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, let's hear it. Well, you said you had a helicopter story.
SPEAKER_04: What's the helicopter story helicopters also New York
SPEAKER_03: stories. So I went to deep dale to play golf with a certain well known individual. And we chopper we chopper back a finance individual.
SPEAKER_04: Politics, well known political. Okay, so this is not a rock and
SPEAKER_01: roller. You do not want to step foot in a helicopter with a rock and roll star. No, no. So here's my story, which is why I totally freaked
SPEAKER_03: out about helicopters. And I can't this was eight years ago. We played deep dale, which is just you know, outside New York, get in this the chopper lands in the middle of thing. I was like, okay, that's fine, you know. And we're going and I'm already feeling kind of skittish. I don't like helicopters. Get to the East Side Heliport. And the East Side Heliport is basically right by the East River. And so the helicopter descends. And one of the skis doesn't actually land on the fucking oops thing. And so he do it does a little Tilty poops. And then the guy comes back up and then he lands. You honestly like I have never been more scared in my life. That's it. And I was like, never won any besties. It's a bestie band for life for making
SPEAKER_04: a pack here. Nobody in fucking it's crazy. So that's why I'm on
SPEAKER_03: New York. Last New York story was I was there two days ago, or for the last couple days for Santa Con in the middle of it in the middle of this army karam breakout. By the way, had a beautiful dinner. After the game, Draymond Kevin dread me bunch of friends. Did you go to the game? No, we went to the private room at carbon. It was so brutal, though, I have to tell you, I feel so disgusting with myself. I had a work dinner. And I have sushi at the work dinner. And then you know, drake text after the game. He's like, Hey, look, we're all having dinner at carbon. I said, Okay, I'll head through. I went to the hotel. I called Matt, I said, I'm brushing my teeth. And she said, but you're going out. And I said, Yes, but if I brush my teeth, I'm not going to eat a second dinner. And I thought, you know, and then but I made a mistake. Oh, mistake. Oh, but I didn't floss. So I was unflossed button. I brush my teeth. Okay, I show up and fucking I lose it. And yes, wine and dessert and bread. pasta pasta. It was really brutal. And by 3am I stumble home. And I felt so bad because I had to wake up at like, you know, eight o'clock in the morning. No, my first meeting was a 745. Well, congratulations to stuff. By the way. Incredible. No, shooter of all time. He's a virtuoso. Yeah. Anyways, that was my that was my
SPEAKER_04:
SPEAKER_03: New York story. I gained here's my here's my I gained one kilo 2.2 pounds I gained in two days. Here's my carbon story. hardest
SPEAKER_04: thing to hardest reservation to get New York sacks is like Jake Al Nita. Help me to favor what's the best place in New York to do a closing dinner. I'm like, I got you. I got my guy. Get my guy on the horn. My guys like, Okay, I got you. carbon. Friday fucking night. Eight o'clock hardest ticket in New York. You know what sacks does? goes dark. Friday afternoon. 1pm. He's like, Yeah, we're not gonna make it. I'm like, Oh, my God, my friend is like, Jake, how your guy burned the carbon res. That
SPEAKER_01: was the bird IPO. I was gonna take the founder out to dinner that night at carbon and then it turned into like the big group dinner with like 30 people. So it moved over to Well, by the way, the the private room, which is like, you
SPEAKER_03: know, not in the restaurant, but it's like a little bit on the side. It only fits like 1520 people. So it's not like you can and that's it. That's then it's really tight. How? What was Steph's? How did Steph feel?
SPEAKER_03: No, Steph wasn't there. Draymond. Kevin, me. Benny Fowler morale, but just a bunch of a Kevin Kevin Durant. Yeah. Kevin Durant still friendly with
SPEAKER_04: he's honestly he's he's such a great guy. I love Kevin. He's
SPEAKER_03: like, he really is really, really, really good. She had stayed super, super sensitive. Cool. He's friends again with always. He's always he was always when they had their blow
SPEAKER_04: up. It was more like their brothers. And it was just a little bit like when you started talking like Joe Pesci. Did the
SPEAKER_01: Kevin Durant ever start talking about Joe Pesci?
SPEAKER_04: Baseball. All right. It was an eventful week on Twitter. We're only one week into the new Twitter CEOs rain. Jack is gone and already David Sachs has been flagged. It's a guy can't be a coincidence that you were talking about them flagging accounts at the end of free speech. And that pull it up on the screen everybody. Investors should be spending their time finding good investments not endlessly debating interest rates, inflation and tax policy. But that's the uncertainty Washington has created. It's a great tweet. I like that tweet actually. And then the flag. The conversation from sacks has been flagged. Some conversations can get heavy. Don't forget the human behind the screen. Do you think that this is that's
SPEAKER_03: machine learned? Or do you think that that's an editor that goes in there and actually machine really flags machine learned? No,
SPEAKER_01: I think it's a great question. But what did but what is in
SPEAKER_03: there that actually triggers debating? Washington, interest rates, tax policy, Washington, I'm not sure
SPEAKER_04: I'm not sure that you could build the ratio. I don't know
SPEAKER_03: how you would build a function that would wait this in a way where this could get flagged of all the things you could say with those words. This is so benign. Well, I think it's the kind of it seems to be this thing's kind of ward off
SPEAKER_02: bullying attacks on sex, which I don't think sex needs to be too worried about. All right, because you're telling this to
SPEAKER_04: people who would reply, you're saying it's there to protect me.
SPEAKER_01: It's to protect you. It's one of those things where they're like
SPEAKER_02: trying to get people to not insult you in the comments. We're talking about that. Do you get a lot of insults and comments on your tweets? Oh, undoubtedly, but so it could be a blank. This tweets comments
SPEAKER_01: section was pretty benign. Oh, right. It may not be about the tweet. It might be about the
SPEAKER_04: replies. No, this wasn't that hot. This wasn't that hot. I think you
SPEAKER_01: might be onto something. You know, Michelle tandler got the same label around the same day for a tweet that seemed totally innocuous too. So what I wonder about is, you know, is this label to protect us? Or is it a way is it sort of a passive aggressive way for snowflakes at Twitter? So like label people they don't like and sort of suggests are vaguely disreputable? I don't think it's that I don't think it's
SPEAKER_03: right. It's a left wing conspiracy. It's the it's the
SPEAKER_04: libs going after the sex. You're paranoid. liberals getting I haven't seen you like people.
SPEAKER_01: Blanket attempt to try to kind of mute the tone a little bit
SPEAKER_02: across the debating that happens and the comments that come across in the replies and I think they're just trying to like get everyone to tone it down a bit. I mean, before you tweet it, it'd be really interesting to know whether this was algorithmic or was editorial
SPEAKER_03: because I think if it's editorial, it does actually I don't think it's as extreme as what David just said, but it skews more in the realm of like people with an axe to grind can flag one thing over another or not. Right. But if it's algorithmic, I think that that algorithm probably just needs a lot of tweaking because it's not well anyway, this doesn't it
SPEAKER_02: say that there's a person behind the tweet. It's like trying to get people to not say there's nothing wrong with the warning. The warning is charming the warnings charming. It's it's it's
SPEAKER_04: nice to each other. It's ridiculous. Like your mom
SPEAKER_01: inserting herself and be like now remember,
SPEAKER_04: it's it's there to suggest that there might be something wrong
SPEAKER_01: with the content that's being posted. Well, you know, in other words, in other words, the content is so triggering that, you know, it needs warning labels. Do you guys think that paternalism has a role on social
SPEAKER_02: networks to try and mollify the the kind of discourse being too acrimonious? Like, I think we need some some of the transparency that jack
SPEAKER_01: dorsey repeatedly promised at all the congressional hearings remember when he got hauled up there, he promised that they would give more transparency about the way that their algorithms worked. Where is that? And it has to be delivered. And it hasn't been delivered up. They promised it. Now jack dorsey's skipped out of town. And there's a new guy in charge. Well, we need to know how these algorithms work because they are pressing their thumb on the scale. You know, of debate in the marketplace of ideas by suggesting that some ideas are sketchier than others.
SPEAKER_04: They should just put here, this was algorithmically done based on they should explain it under there should be a little question mark over the question mark. Based on the words in the thread. It feels like things are getting heated here. We did this before. Users reported this as a heated thread. So we put this here or a human decided, no, we decided Yeah, but you want it to
SPEAKER_02: be an open marketplace of ideas. But the fact is, it's Twitter's marketplace of ideas. Yeah. And Facebook's is Facebook's marketplace of ideas. And at the end of the day, I don't think you're going to get away from any of these centralized social networks, having anything but some degree of moderation to play a role in a related thing. They didn't just target sacks.
SPEAKER_04: Also, Chamatha, you didn't see this, but they flagged one of the debates just this afternoon. What up? As you can see here, it's slightly different. It says layers are for players, this conversation will drift to $5,000 sweaters. So a big warning for Chabot just and for the people replying, be careful. This is that that must be that must be then that must have been
SPEAKER_03: human. Human for sure. And this one came in for profit G.
SPEAKER_04: Another one came in for profit G. So and then this case, I think, we're actually trying to think about the public good. This guy is full of shit. He thought JC Benny would beat
SPEAKER_03: Amazon. How many how many hours of Masterclass Adobe Photoshop did you take to get this? I didn't make these my meme team
SPEAKER_04: did. I'm convinced you have two ways to raise your next fund in Silicon Valley one have one of the top 50 podcasts in the world or to have a strong meme game and I'm going for both. Now has been a really good one. And this one is. And they put it on your
SPEAKER_01: profile page. This was crazy. Warning this person has interesting things to say. If you if you're too interesting, you get labeled now. It's really crazy. I saw Jay, I saw Jay Cal having too much fun with this. I'm like, I gotta get it
SPEAKER_04: on this. I need a meme team. If anybody out there, I don't care if you're I need a comedian. I'm willing to pay on a paper meme, whatever it takes. Okay. In a related story, Democrats want racial equity audits at tech companies according to the Washington Free Beacon, which sacks correct me if I'm wrong, that's some sort of wacky right wing publication. I've heard of it. Okay, Washington Free Beacon, if instituted orders would have veto power over every product or initiative. That's not an exaggeration is what the story says. One proposal from House Democrats would find companies 20,000 a day for not completing by any independent racial equity audits. A left wing nonprofit called color of change is pushing for these audits last week, their president called for independent auditors, vet new products from tech companies before they released in front of Congress. 2018 color of change suddenly push Facebook into completing an audit. They call for more restrictions on Trump's post coach range itself, pushed for Trump to be permanently banned from the platform. Just
SPEAKER_03: so you know, this is exactly the rough version of what happened to Microsoft in their DOJ settlement, their antitrust settlement was effectively an oversight where lawyers at the DOJ were the product managers and had not effectively veto right, but you had to approve product before you could push them for 10 years. This is essentially what caused bombers reign to be so inominious. It's like you couldn't do anything because you had a plan to do something and you'd have to go to these random folks who didn't really have the context to make a decision one way or the other on feature. So I mean, the idea that they would do this is a pretty it's pretty crazy. I need
SPEAKER_04: a point of clarification here. I've heard the term racial audits or racial equity audits. My understanding of those were to understand the composure of the company in terms of you know, the diversity in the company, but this is something different. This is in the product to make sure the product isn't racist. Can products be racist? What's an example of a product being racist? I don't understand what they would find. Let me unpack this for you. Okay, what they are basically
SPEAKER_01: saying is that these big companies and the for example, they've called on Google to conduct one of these audits, they want all these big companies conduct these audits. These so called auditors are actually political consultants who are members of the Democratic Party or friends of the senators are pushing for this. They're political activists. It's a grift. And it's partly a grift. But it's more than that. Because, you know, when you conduct an audit, let's just take this word audit for a second, okay, you bring in a big five accounting firm, and they will check your numbers according to generally accepted accounting principles gap and make sure that the numbers are what you reported them to be. That is the purpose of an audit. And if the auditor ever says that you've done anything wrong, like you have to fix it, there's no choice. Or you can appeal to some other auditor and have them redo the work. Okay, according to these generally accepted principles. With an equity audit, what exactly are the principles that are being enforced or checked here, there is no generally accepted list of equity principles that must be enforced these companies, basically, you have to do whatever this political activist tells you to do. I mean, it's essentially like bringing in a party commissar to now take over the company, or at least be inside the company telling the executives and officer of the company what to do. It's something that frankly, the CCP would do, it does feel a little
SPEAKER_04: like, yeah, Stasi, like, didn't we have all the companies on their own from Twitter to Google to Facebook release their own diversity stats years ago, I think this diversity, it's about
SPEAKER_01: equity, it's about equity. So so let's explain the difference in
SPEAKER_04: what that means. This is some companies run like the day to day life of the employees, they're not just the composure and the breakdown of the employee. Look, equity, equity
SPEAKER_01: means anything that progresses to say it means we've seen on this program before how equity has dumped the shark, there's now there's a provision in the infrastructure bill for tree equity. So I mean, really, any disparity that occurs, that progressives don't like can now be called a violation of equity. And this gives them the authorization to come in there and start giving orders.
SPEAKER_04: It's very weird that I don't understand how the product then review gets stopped to throttle you from leasing product as a punitive. Let me give you an example. So recently, you know, I wrote a
SPEAKER_01: piece called the the no buy list where I basically you had companies like PayPal, and so these other financial firms were starting to deny service to customers to users based on their political affiliations. And not just like people who are in, you know, well known hate groups that like everybody sort of, you know, issues and wants to stay away from. But these are people with relatively down the middle conservative, you know, conservative groups, and they were being denied service by, you know, fintech firms. So now I'm not saying that this is what this means. But if this equity auditors tells you well, look, I don't think it's equitable to allow these conservative groups to, you know, be a user of your product. Well, what's the company going to do? They're gonna have to listen to that. And that that is a plausible scenario, given that it's already occurred.
SPEAKER_03: We thought we've we've said this so many times on the pod, but I just want to say it again for because I guess a lot of folks are new and listening. Whenever you hear equity used by a politician, it usually means there's a power grab involved. Yeah, because if you really want things to be fair, you want things to be equal, right? Tocracy, you want equality. But whenever you start throwing over the word equity around and say, we want racial equity, it's a bunch of, you know, a small number of people who, you know,
SPEAKER_03: basically have and live by what I, you know, what's often called luxury beliefs, who want to judge other people who want to be morally absolutist, and then who want to basically like, you know, exercise a power grab. And we have to push back on that stuff, because it's just a slippery, slippery slope. Well, this also seems like overbearing red tape for
SPEAKER_04: companies. I mean, if the company has no problems, no complaints against it, you know, releases their diversity numbers, like, what is the point of going? Let's use let's use an example that builds on what David said.
SPEAKER_03: Let's take square. Okay, one of the one of the most incredible things that Square did was in a hackathon, essentially build a cash app. Yeah. And one of the most incredible things that happened in the cash app was that it really started to blow up in urban communities. Okay. And it starts to normalize banking, opening up bank accounts, having more savings, understanding, you know, an on ramp into crypto, you know, cash app has probably done more to get black and brown people into crypto and to save money and to understand their cash than almost anybody else as as almost explicit strategy. And so if somebody's supposed to go in there and just, you know, arbitrarily judge whether there's too many white people that work at Square or not enough black people, and so x, y, z thing has to change, or such and such a feature doesn't actually speak to folks, so you can't do it. It's insanity. It's like also to set to your point, sax is what what are the, what
SPEAKER_04: do these people know? Like, what is their qualification? And what, what's the goal? What's the goal? Right. And to build on Thomas point, if the
SPEAKER_01: senator so I think Cory Booker was the one who proposed this, if the senators want those specific policies implemented in the fortune 500, let them pass a bill to do it and let all of our elected representatives vote on that bill. And then we can see if it really if it's popular enough to pass, and whether it passes constitutional muster. They won't do that because these bills, if they were directly concretize, for they don't have, would be very unpopular. So instead, what they do is tell you, well, we're not going to do this directly, we're going to put pressure on these big companies to hire one of our political friends, again, this like commissar like person, and empower them to tell these companies what to do. So it's really kind of insidious what they're doing. And they're kind of covering it all up with these nice sounding names. I mean, who could be against a racial equity audit, right? Because yes, if you're if you're against it, you must be a racist, and you must not believe in auditing companies. Right? Right. So word game, you have to you just it's a word game. It's it's
SPEAKER_03: using words that are really loaded and mean a lot to a lot of us, right? If I hear racism and race, by ears, triggering, it's not triggering, but my ears perk up. And I have, I have a lot of inbuilt opinions on it that have been governed by 45 years as living as a as a brown man. And so okay, it stands to reason that I'm going to pay attention. But on the surface, if you say racial equity audit, it also doesn't seem actually all that bad. It seems like reasonably benign. And that seems like an okay thing to do. It's just that most of us then stop at that point and move on. Right. But if you actually look at the rules, again, I would just say whenever political frameworks use the word, we need to create more equity. The outcomes are horrible. For example, look in healthcare, you know, if we have used this idea of healthcare, equity, health equity, and we've misused it to such a degree. And all we see is that now the system is so perverted. It also doesn't work for the majority of people that have actually had the healthcare system work for right like at the top of the pecking order has always been white men have always gotten the best care and we've always measured our healthcare progress in America, based on the longevity of men, white men, you know, 78 7980 years old, and then it started to degrade. And people are curious what was happening. And underneath it all was just a bunch of power grabs under the realm of equity. We passed all these crazy laws, we basically didn't do anything to really create more accountability and a cost based system. And here we are. So at some point, when the citizen re hears that word, you're going to have to put your thinking cap on and actually take the opposite view, which is hold on, this is a really nice sounding word. It may not be what I think it is. And I got to pay attention because more than if I didn't hear the word at all, anything you have on race, Friedberg, representing South
SPEAKER_04: Africans, fundamentally, I don't think this is about race, Jay, call it
SPEAKER_01: this is about power, power. It's a bar. It feels like a power grip. Also, it feels like
SPEAKER_04: a little great. It feels a little bit of a grift. I know, I had heard on the back channel that a lot of the people who are criticizing some big tech companies who were getting, you know, I'm not gonna say who or under what monitor sweater Karen, that's what I carry. But there was a group of people who were like attacking big sweater Karen, if she has an opinion on
SPEAKER_03: sweater, she must have an opinion on racial equity. Come on. Okay, please. What a current as the issue is, they would
SPEAKER_04: complain and create these, you know, basically, you know, Twitter mobs. And then they'd say, Oh, yeah, and hire us for $20,000. We'll come in and fix the problem for you. So they were creating the Twitter mob to come in and solve the problem. That's so I was like, Oh, wow, that is. That's so dirty. No, I mean, these HR consultants who've
SPEAKER_01: written these books, like, was it D'Angelo or whatever on white fragility, and, you know, how to be an anti racist, I mean, they're all making a fortune in corporate fees, you know, charging 2030 $1,000 per, per gig. I mean, it is absolutely a racket. I'm not a fan of equality of outcome. I'm more a
SPEAKER_02: fan of equality of opportunity. And I think many, many of these sorts of folks, I try and identify methods to drive equality of outcome. And it inhibits the competitive forces that cause the best person, the best idea, the best business, the best market model to win. And, you know, I think it's
SPEAKER_02: easy to conflate the two when you don't really think through it. But it is certainly appropriate and reasonable to make sure that folks aren't discriminated against when they apply for a job. I don't think it's appropriate to then apply considerations of race and other factors when people are equally in the same job on who gets to have the chance at the bonus. It is the best performer that should have the chance at the bonus. And the same should be true in marketplaces. And the same should be true with business. And I think that what we're really seeing is this fundamental effort to try and generate equality and outcomes in lots of different manifestations. And we're seeing it more frequently and more severely than we've seen it historically. But it's not, I don't think it's the right model. And it's only going to lead to the demise of marketplace dynamics and the things that cause forces for success and progress to win.
SPEAKER_03: You know, we mentioned this a couple of times, I'll just say it again. But we are about to have probably the most significant movement and questioning of equity versus equality. Because I think in the next month, maybe in the next two months, we're going to sort of see a pretty strict opinion on affirmative action. And if you talk to legal scholars, the overwhelming consensus is this is gone. And, you know, we're going to have to figure out how to rebuild, you know, what was a really important system that tried to give folks at least, you know, getting to the starting line in the same way. But it's not gonna it's not really going to exist in this in the same way, shape or form. Speaking of Karen's, Elizabeth Warren was bashing on over
SPEAKER_04: taxes. And Elon has a Twitter handle with some followers, and he responded. Elizabeth Warren says let's change the rigged tax code. So the person of the year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else. Unfortunately, for Elizabeth Warren, Elon Musk is pretty good at Twitter. He replied, and if you open your eyes for two seconds, you would realize I pay more taxes than any American in history this year. He paid, which is, I guess true. He paid more in taxes now than any American in history. As a side note, Elizabeth Warren has a 12
SPEAKER_04: million dollar net worth and I saw that she paid no taxes on her equity holdings because she didn't sell anything, which is how the tax code works. Elon then responded, don't spend it all at once. Oh, wait, you already did. And then, you know, after the warm up replies, you on really, you know, got in the zone. And like Steph Curry, just started draining half court shots. He ratioed her every single day, shared her with 50,000 replies yet you remind me of when I was a kid and my friends angry mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason. Please don't call the manager on me. Senator Karen, you want also responded to Bernie Sanders tweet today about climate change. Bernie Sanders said, future generations asked us what do we do to stop the climate crisis? How will the answer and Elon said, and so great tweets. But to the bigger picture, did these people even know what's going on in the world? No, they woke up, they
SPEAKER_03: woke up on the wrong side of the tilt bed. Yeah, because in like a 24 hour period, he was the time person of the year, the ft person of the year, and they just went into super mega tilt mode, and the build back better act got shelved. And he and then
SPEAKER_04: build on and well, I mean, you know, I think we talked about
SPEAKER_03: this last week, but that bill is dead now. I mean, they pushed it to March to basically avoid a downvote. Nothing's gonna happen. David, you're right. We said last week, wouldn't it be
SPEAKER_04: hilarious if Elon said kill it? And then it got killed? Well, I
SPEAKER_03: don't I don't think that that's why the bill is dying. I think the real reason is that we now see a Fed posture, which is actually pretty reasonable, which actually says, Oh, wait, there's way too much money in the system as it is. Yeah, you know, the Fed two days ago, basically said, we're gonna see up to three rate hikes next year, probably 50 basis points each. So, you know, it's basically acknowledging that these these last, you know, several years, we have printed way too much money, and they're trying to fix the problem that they created. So that's, I think, the real reason. And then the CBO comes out and basically says the Congressional Budget Office and says, this thing is a white albatross, that's going to cost way more than you guys think it will. And so it puts Biden in this very awkward situation, which is, you know, on the one hand, he supports Powell. And, you know, he supports institutions or has historically like the CBO, but he effectively then has to push back on both of them all in one fall soup to try to run this bill down people's throats. And the support is, I think it's crumbling. And so, you know, to save face, they basically said, Well, we'll put a pin on this, and we'll revisit it in March. But you guys know what's going to happen in the next three months, there's going to be some other crisis, most folks will forget, and it may just allow them to move on without having to actually deal with the potential of this thing getting defeated, which would just be, I think, cataclysmically bad for sacks for Democrats, you were on
SPEAKER_04: CNBC today, I thought you said something really important to where you said, it Listen, maybe if we just calm things down for a year, we can, you know, get through I'm not sure the exact quote was, but maybe you could unpack that sentiment you had on CNBC today, because I thought that was pretty important.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I mean, I agree with what Jamal said this. I mean, this this BBB bill was particularly anachronistic once the 6.8% you know, inflation print came out. In other words, we're in a hyper inflationary environment. And here comes this bill that the CBO says, if you know, over 10 years would cost $5 trillion. That's the last thing we need is more money printing when you know, we've got this inflationary fire out of control. So I think that is why the bill is being shelved, probably not to return. I think that the larger problem that we have in the markets is that this there's a tremendous amount of uncertainty being created right now by Washington, we've had tremendous uncertainty over spending, over taxes over interest rates. And the conversations that I'm having with friends who are investors in really every asset class, real estate, VC crypto, the conversations are all the same, what's interest rates gonna do? What's the macro picture gonna be? I've never seen investors who should be focused on, hey, do I miss this company or buy this building, whatever. Those aren't the conversations. It's all everyone's a macro economist now. And so we're also distracted by this. And so now the Fed a couple of days ago finally gave us clarity. I mean, what they basically said is they're going to accelerate the taper, they'll they'll end quantitative easing at the end of q1. And then we're basically gonna get means to people who don't know what they've been purchasing and
SPEAKER_04: why. Yeah, I mean, quantitative easing is kind of a weird term.
SPEAKER_01: What it means is that the Fed has been going into the bond market and buying bonds, I think, basically, mortgage backed securities and treasuries, and they've been buying, I think, about 90 billion a month, they're going to cut that back to 60 billion a month. And that'll continue, just explain
SPEAKER_03: it a little bit more, when you do that, what you're doing is, you're giving somebody that owns those bonds money. Okay, so the Fed prints money, the government prints $100, takes that $100 steps into the market, and takes something from you, in this case, it's a bond and gives you that freshly printed $100. What are you going to do? Well, you're probably going to go and spend that you're going to buy other things. And that's the cycle of inflation that quantitative easing basically creates. And so when you call it when you talk about tapering, what that means is slowing down the money printing machine and slowing down, you stepping in the market and buying assets with money that you've created out of thin air. And it's up to other people
SPEAKER_04: to buy those assets. If other people see value in them, you
SPEAKER_03: then they can then are forced to find the real market clearing price.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, those those bonds are now on the feds balance sheet. And so there's a very interesting chart showing assets that are owned by the Fed. And it went up by something like 3 trillion during COVID. So that is the sort of monetary stimulus that's been pumped into the market over the last couple of years separately, we've had something like six or 7 trillion of just spending by the government. So, you know, tremendous amount of 3 trillion is not thrown away. So we're clear,
SPEAKER_04: we're going to get interest on that. And people some number will default, some of them will get paid back. It's a way of stimulating the economy. But we now know after this, STEMI checks, and all the stimulus we did during the pandemic, we don't need to put more fire or oxygen or kerosene on what we got going in this economy, correct? David? Yeah, I mean, we, we should show that chart about how
SPEAKER_01: much the feds balance sheet has grown over the last couple of years. But, you know, the argument I think would be the reason why they buy these assets is if they're buying bonds, it basically means that it keeps the yield down, right? Because if they weren't the ones buying them, someone else would have to buy these bonds to keep the government funded. And they might demand a higher interest rate a higher yield on the bonds. So this by having the Fed come in and increase the demand for the government's debt, it means that the government can sell its debt more cheaply. So when they stopped doing that, I think you can expect that, you know, interest rates are going to need to rise in order to make our debt attractive to, you know, to bond buyers.
SPEAKER_03: The other thing the other thing, by the way, that the Fed did when they did that was it wasn't just government bonds that they were buying. They decided completely arbitrarily, at one point to start buying certain corporate debt. So they own like Ford debt, GM debt, commercial, that's called Yeah, no, no, no, like, well, not coming commercial papers, sort of more very short term, short term duration. But like, how do you make a decision to start buying corporate bonds? It's like buying corporate equities? Do you buy Google versus Facebook? Do you have a who's the capital allocator making
SPEAKER_04: that decision? So more importantly, who's who's setting
SPEAKER_02: the price? Who's setting the price? So, you know, these guys
SPEAKER_03: have been off the reservation for a long time, I think it's fair to say that they were forced into action without a playbook in the middle of a once in a lifetime once a century pandemic, fair enough. And I think they actually did a pretty reasonable job. But we just kept the tap on for so long. Yeah. And now we're like dealing with this stuff, trying to figure out how do we actually compensate. So the idea that we would add knowing all of this. So it's one thing, I think, if Biden passed the bill, five months ago, six months ago, because we didn't know any of this stuff. But to do it now knowing that I think that it's really hard. And I bet you that it's not just mentioned on the democrats that are having a little bit of heartburn and second thoughts. It's probably more because I suspect that they could have forced his hand really, if it was just up to him. But I suspect there are other democrats who are now teetering on the fence thinking I don't want my legacy to be tied to this, when we're printing 678% inflation, for me to basically keep the money printing machine on because it's it's insane.
SPEAKER_04: This is like the Sopranos episode where he gave him like, he fronted the guy like 45 boxes of ziti. And like you wake up and this guy can't pay the bill on the poker game. Like where can we even afford to pay this back at some point? Yeah, look, I think when when March comes around, and this
SPEAKER_01: bill supposedly going to be brought back off the table, we're going to be into the election season in 2022. And I don't know that Democrats are going to want to defend this. I think there is a view on the democratic side that if they deliver enough goodies to their base, then that will help them win elections. But I think what helps you win elections more than delivering goodies to your special interests is for the economy to be healthy. Yeah. And if they are sort of pressurizing this inflation situation, that is, I think, ultimately, that could backfire, I think that's gonna be worse for the economy. Frankly, I think Manchin is doing Biden a favor because if the economy does grow by 4% next year, as the Fed is predicting it is, and if inflation comes down, because you stop printing money the way they're doing, then you know, I think the Democrats will do better in the election if the economy is good. I mean, one of the reasons why they did so poorly, you know, in the off year election a month ago, is that there's tremendous economic anxiety out there, people are seeing the inflation at the gas tank when they go to buy food. And, you know, if that continues, I think they're gonna do very poorly next year. I want to just like bring up this chart from Fred, on total assets on the Fed balance sheet, I think it is really interesting to look at this thing. Because so the Fed had about a trillion of assets until 2008. Okay, then we had the financial crisis, and they doubled it. That's when the quantitative easing began, I went to 2 trillion, but then from roughly 2009 to about 2020, before COVID, somehow the balance sheet grew from 2 trillion to 4 trillion. So and it had gone to four and a half, and they were starting to shed assets. So they're starting to get off drugs. But it was still from two to 4 trillion, between this like 2009 and 2020 period when supposedly we weren't in a crisis. So, you know, they've continued this quantitative easing, then COVID hits, and the amount grows from four to 7 trillion, just in 2020. And since then, it's gone from seven to a little under 9 trillion. Just in the last, you know, well, they off our books ever. I mean, these are 20 year
SPEAKER_01: sell them. Well, I either they're gonna have to sell the assets or they can do well, well, it's not like that. They basically are the are the Fed is the one who bought the government debt. So they're buying is call it a 10 year Treasury. So yeah, I guess they could just wait till the bond gets paid off. But but I guess they could do that. But but now that Fed has an incentive not to let the assets get toxic, right? So if you know, the assets would get toxic if you know, if interest rates go up too high, that drives bond prices down. And now all the assets on their books are worth a lot less. Yeah, this is this is like the point where we have to just call
SPEAKER_03: it and say, Okay, you know what, let's move on meaning in the sense that, like, we have to go to these root causes, because the money is more money is not going to fix what we're dealing with. So I just put something in the group chat. And I just want to get your guys's reaction to it. Because when I saw it, it blew my mind. There was a study, okay, that was just published a few days ago. And it said the following thing. Children born during the pandemic have experienced a catastrophic drop in cognitive development of 22 IQ points. Yeah. And when you look at it, the people that were the most affected were male children, and children of lower socio economic families. But
SPEAKER_03: everybody was affected. Yet you see the amount of money that we're spending already. So adding more money to something is not going to make it better if what we're spending today is basically just getting flushed on the toilet. And these are the kinds of things that really matter. How do you allow an entire generation of kids to see to see to suffer? By the way, what does that show? That means that teachers actually are unbelievably important. So number one, they should get paid a lot more. Okay, let's just put it that way. There should be more of them and smaller class sizes. Exactly. But if you if
SPEAKER_03: you have, you know, these completely screwed up incentives, between, you know, the organizations, the unions that represent these teachers, and then the parents who have completely different incentives, and they basically fight to never be in classroom and to not really teach this is the measurable outcome. Yeah, the IQ of our children. I mean, we are ability, their executive function, their scores are going
SPEAKER_04: down. How do they recover from that? We a lot of tutoring.
SPEAKER_04: So we're in summer school. Yeah, I mean, zoom's not gonna do it.
SPEAKER_03: I don't think more fortnight in roadblocks fixes this problem. No, definitely not. And I feel terrible because like, you know, as a parent, that's that was my solution. Right? I was struggling with the zooms, like every other parent. And then in the evenings, I was just so burnt and just feeling so beside myself in the middle of the pandemic. Whereas I had a no iPad rule for my kids. I broke down. Yep. You know,
SPEAKER_04: everybody did. I mean, it's like your home with your kids all day long. It's not how it's supposed to work. And so the point is, like, this is where the government should step in and
SPEAKER_03: actually say, Okay, here, let me take leadership on this topic. Right? And talk to the unions, fix whatever needs to be fixed, amp up the money into charter schools, do whatever you need to do. But please fix the problem. But randomly spending money to try to buy votes. I think people see through that it just doesn't work. And related to that Omnicron is spreading
SPEAKER_04: like crazy. New York City. Omnicron. Omnicron. There is no n Omnicron. Omnicron. Omnicron. Yes, I'll learn how to pronounce it when it's gone. Omnicron Omnicron is spreading like crazy. In New York City, and in
SPEAKER_04: the UK, amongst other places, the NBA and the NFL are seeing surges. I've had a ton of people I know test positive this week.
SPEAKER_02: You guys had that? Family friends? Crazy? No, it's not one of the people or I know so many people that city is related.
SPEAKER_02: Yeah. And a lot of people that don't have any symptoms. So here's the chart of cases, cases spiking, but hospitalizations
SPEAKER_04: and deaths are flat or going down in places where these outbreaks are occurring. The UK charts are even stalker. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence, everybody on tik tok, and Instagram and Twitter, young people in New York who went to Santa con are saying they all got it. But if you look at what is Santa con? Santa con is the worst holiday of the year.
SPEAKER_04: It's a time when a bunch of young people dress as Santa Claus and get drunk. And you have 1000 people. It's a bar crawl. You see this? You see how you see how Monty's wearing his
SPEAKER_02: Santa Claus. That's what goes on. Everyone wears their little Santa outfit and they go bar crawling. So it's not sexy Santa. Well, actually, I have a story about
SPEAKER_04: that. I was in San Francisco. You were sexy Santa.
SPEAKER_03: No, I literally took my daughters out for pizza. Tony's
SPEAKER_04: in North Beach. And you know, I got my three daughters. And there's all these people walking around like look dad, it's Santa Claus, like a lot of them. And so there's 1000 Santa Claus descend on North Beach. And I turn around and I kid you not. There are two old guys. I'm talking 70 years old. And they're wearing a baseball Santa hat. Santa boots. And nothing in between. Literally. Fuck naked in on the street. So yeah, bro, you're you're so you're so demented. Okay, you're like this
SPEAKER_03: like, like Unky perve. Like every time I get those text messages, I don't know what to think. Did you guys click on the Twitter link with Jason was like, guys, search for the Folsom Street Fair on Twitter. I can't I can't unsee what I saw. I was like, why is street 20 trending? I was like, I thought
SPEAKER_04: there was a terrorist attack. Bro, that was so brutal. You should send that shit around.
SPEAKER_03: Like it's so brutal. I was like, don't click on false. I was like, Oh, this is a Twitter link. What is it about web 3.0? Not exactly the Folsom Street Fair. I'm gonna go ahead say
SPEAKER_04: don't search for that. If you have kids around, it's a little bit intense. But anyway, the Santa calm was on Saturday, December 11. And so here we are five days late, you know, four or five days later, and the stuff hitting if that's true, it almost perfectly mirrors the original outbreak after St. Patty's Day in March 2020. And if you look on social media, all the city MD lines where people get tested are around the block and 30 NBA players have entered the COVID protocol in the last two weeks, about 7% of the league and we had a big question mark of would this be less more contagious? It obviously is check less deadly. It apparently some studies show as much as 40 times more infectious than delta. Highly
SPEAKER_02: contagious extreme very much airborne. It's going everywhere. Like I said last time, if it does end up having low severity and low hospitalization rate and low death rate for vaccinated or vaccinated plus boosted populations, this could end up being a massive immunizing event, meaning like a lot of people will develop new antibodies and resistance. And you know, that could be a net good thing. But it's certainly the case that this is not a one strain one shot and done pandemic. This is an endemic kind of circumstance, we're going to be in this for a while. And, you know, the circumstances are one that may kind of require, you know, an adaptation in terms of how we live and operate. And especially as it relates to things that are so important, like keeping businesses open at schools. You know, I think we're going to use recent memory to guide future decision making or at least politicians and you know, kind of lawmakers will and they'll say, Hey, this is what we did last time this happened. And we just saw this in California, where they're like last time, like we told everyone going to lockdown or wear masks indoors again, and we're seeing that behavior again. Certainly, it may have an impact in terms of the spread. But this is highly contagious, and it's going to spread everywhere. And I think there's just some adaptation that maybe is going to be needed here over the long run. There's no end, there's no end in sight. There's no end in sight, but it is less deadly. And so it could
SPEAKER_04: be mass immunizing. And that has led people to think of this hurt immunity, potentially, if there's not another variant. SACS, if the NBA and the NFL are learning to live with COVID. And obviously, when we were in Miami, there's no COVID. And Austin, there's no COVID. Yeah, is everybody now just go because it seems like the politicians now, whether it's in Europe, we're seeing the protests. And I think we'll see them here in the United States. If this keeps up Australia, obviously having protests as well. The public has decided, I think we're willing to have 1000 people die a day or a certain number of people die today to get back to normal. So what do you think the end game here is going into 20? I'll make a prediction for 2022. Okay, I
SPEAKER_01: will predict that even the blue areas of the country are going to have fatigue with all these COVID restrictions. And so even the blue state governors who are addicted to their state of emergencies and their restrictions and lockdowns and closures and mass mandates, even they are going to have to give them up in 2022. Because the country is sick and tired of this. Peter fam had a really good tweet. Just the other day, maybe you guys can dig it up, where he had a friend visit him from Texas. And they've been living normally there since like July of 2020. Roughly kids in school, occasionally someone get sick, but they've been living normally. Okay, it's a manageable problem. And he couldn't believe Peter's friend could not believe how they're living in LA. We're still everyone's living in fear. They've we now have a new one month indoor mass mandate. Thanks to you know, Governor Newsom, who still is ruling the state under state of emergency. What good is that going to do? So I think you know, but but but I think that some of these blue areas people are so petrified still, over the virus. And I think it's just because of they're the ones who have been ingesting all this fear porn coming from the media. And but I but I think it's going to break I think the the finally this hysteria and panic will break it'll crest over the blue parts of the country in 2022. They're already back to normal in the red parts. And especially omicron. You can't stop this. Okay, I think that's the salient point here. Nothing works.
SPEAKER_04: You're all going to get the little little stupid VAX card
SPEAKER_01: that you have to show everywhere to get like popcorn at a movie theater like, you know, in San Francisco doesn't do anything because vaccinated people can spread it too. So that doesn't do anything and the mass mandate doesn't do anything. You know, and so none of this stuff does anything except getting a vaccine reduces the severity of the illness if you get it and losing weight, and we can't have that conversation. Those
SPEAKER_04: consequences are mainly on the person who decides to do it. I
SPEAKER_01: have to say is we just have to tell everybody, you know,
SPEAKER_04: listen, lose weight, get in shape, eat healthy, get vaccinated, get back to life. That's it. That's the best you can do. I'm I believe everybody's gonna get it. We're starting to see like a real divergence in American life
SPEAKER_01: where and I think omicron if we have lockdowns under omicron and really the big issue is school closures. If we go back to school closures and blue states have more of the learning loss that Jamaat was talking about and I bet we do. Whereas in red states are still out there learning normally and they're dealing with it just like they deal with the outbreak of a flu season or cold season, but they you know, they're just managing it. We're gonna there's gonna be we're gonna be living in two different Americas. But I but I don't believe this is sustainable. I think eventually these governors are holding on to their power and their restrictions are going to lose in 2022. The ones who haven't given it up are gonna are gonna basically fall to a red wave in November 22. I think Nusa might be the only one that schools closed. I see everybody's
SPEAKER_04: canceling their Christmas parties. JP Morgan canceled that. We're close. We're close. Every Christmas party has been getting canceled. And I wonder if schools, I mean, teachers unions, I think they got to be having a meeting right now. They don't even the teachers don't even acknowledge that learning
SPEAKER_01: loss exists. I mean, this is why I decided to homeschool for the
SPEAKER_04: year of the pandemic. And I kept my homeschool teacher for, you know, a couple of hours a day. And my kids have done wonderfully. And it's great to have the ability to afford to be able to do that. But not everybody can have an after school tutor. Let me up level this for a second. Okay, so
SPEAKER_01: I'm spilling the beans on one of my predictions. I'll make it the predictions episode we do. But first we had COVID. Okay. Then we had the overreaction to COVID both public and politically and economically. Economically, we pumped 10 trillion plus of spending, and monetary and QE and all this sort of stuff. Politically, we had these restrictions, school closures, lockdowns, mandates. Okay, I think we're about to enter a new phase, which is the correction to the overreaction. And I think we're already in the correction. So the market's been correcting, growth stocks been correcting for the last five or six weeks. I now think that we're there was a bit of a political correction with young kin winning in Virginia. Remember, that state swung 10 points relative to a year ago. And I think you'll see a further correction both political and economic in 2022. So we may not be completely past COVID. But I think we are going to be past this sort of overreaction to COVID.
SPEAKER_02: What do you guys think about succession? Oh, no, I haven't
SPEAKER_03: seen it. Jeremy strong, Jeremy strong. Let's talk about the Jeremy strong thing. Jeremy strong. Okay, Jeremy strong is a weirdo
SPEAKER_04: according to a New Yorker profile. And there's been a huge response to it. This profile is Kendall, Kendall, Roy and succession handle Roy, who is woke and dumb and ineffective as an executive. And obviously, the show is modeled after Rupert
SPEAKER_04: Murdoch and Fox and the kids there who are not dopey. Actually, in the article, it hinted that most of the sessions, co workers dislike him due to his intensity and methane acted method acting rituals. He won't rehearse with anybody. He's in character all the time, like Daniel Day Lewis, he won't get makeup whenever anybody else does because he doesn't want to reduce the energy and the build up. The article notes there is a fine line that strong walks between being a legendary method actor and just a complete Lee awesome networker.
SPEAKER_03: Wait, can I tell you why this story was interesting to me and why I sent Go ahead, guys. Yeah. Okay, so here's a guy who, in many ways is a virtuoso. And the reason you mean he's a he's a really good actor, because I despise Kendall Roy on that show. And I was wondering, like, is this guy just a terrible actor? Is he such a good actor that I hate them? Yes, I hate him. And that's why I was attracted to this article and in it or after it. So basically, what happens is, he's a virtuoso just and I'll come back to it in a second. These people at the New Yorker, who I guess are just
SPEAKER_03: jealous or want to write clickbait, try to destroy this guy. But what they didn't factor is that when they publish this article, all these other actors would come to his defense and do it really publicly. Yes, and Hathaway and
SPEAKER_04: and Aaron Sorkin wrote a letter exactly that Jessica Chastain
SPEAKER_03: published to Twitter because Aaron Aaron Sorkin doesn't have access to social media by design. And in all of it, they said, this is the most incredible person we've seen Aaron Sorkin says this guy is as good as Dustin Hoffman, which is like, this is as good as it gets. So why was it interesting to me? It's, you have these people who are grinding, and trying to perfect their craft be a virtuoso you talked about Steph Curry grinding, try to perfect his craft, just a little Steph Curry story as a tangent. He brought in this team where they basically started to map out all of the circumferences of the ring of the of the net. And he practiced this summer, literally trying to get it perfectly in to create this very specific kind of swish. And he just kept shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting not you know, all the time, but every day for some number of shots, trying to get the ball perfectly into the basket. That is a level of perfectionism. And if that's being a virtuoso that none of us can really appreciate, but you see the output and we all love it. He's already the goat and he's trying to outdo himself. Here's a
SPEAKER_04: different guy in a completely different theater, but in this
SPEAKER_03: case, acting, trying to also be really legendary, and putting himself through all kinds of stuff, and still not lose himself in it. Okay, so much so that all of these other people really appreciate how amazing is. And to me, what I don't like is that then these critics who don't do anything, who've never accomplished anything at all in their lives, feels judgment, feels so triggered that they have to judge him. It's one thing to not have that skill. I'll never be as good of an actor as Jeremy strong. I'll never be as good about basketball players stuff. But I don't hate these people for that. I'm so happy that people like this exist. But there's a strain of people that exist. And then you also have a platform. Karen, yeah, I was about to connect the dots for you is like, yeah,
SPEAKER_02: look at how the politicians feel the same way about politicians
SPEAKER_04: social media to try to destroy people. Yeah. So instead, what
SPEAKER_03: these people do is they take a shortcut. They're the critics. They're not in the arena. Okay, the folks in the arena are booking wins and losses constantly. You have this you have this strain of impotent critic that doesn't naturally know how to do for themselves. And they somehow have a platform. And then what they end up doing is cutting corners, and then some subset of those start to cheat. Q David.
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, it's a story that Congress back in 2012, passed a bill called the stock act to prohibit members of Congress from trading on their insider knowledge based on you know, based on legislative actions are about to take. And it's been widely flouted by dozens of, you know, representatives and senators. And the problem is, there's no punishment, it's something like a $200 fine or something like that, that gets waived in most of these cases. So it's completely hypocritical, because these are the these politicians, like Senator Karen, they're constantly demonizing and attacking other people to make themselves look better. And then here they are, they've got dirty hands. And they asked Pelosi, they said to Pelosi, Well, don't you think that members of Congress should be prohibited from trading stocks, right? Because their actions have such a huge consequence on them. And Pelosi said, No, it's a it's a free market. It's a free market, which we free to to do that. It's like, huh, you know, I don't remember that being a defense every time you've wanted to regulate some, you know, industry that they doesn't the president have to divest when they take the
SPEAKER_04: presidential office? Isn't that a thing?
SPEAKER_01: Or they put they put their assets in a blind trust. Yeah, so they're blind. So why would senators congress, totally
SPEAKER_04: people be any different? It's absurd that elected officials
SPEAKER_01: should be able to engage in insider trading. It makes no sense. The Fed actually had this issue as well, to two folks on
SPEAKER_03: the Federal Reserve Board resigned. And then Powell issued a whole bunch of I think, new laws, right or regulations inside the Fed to try to fix it. And the same issue occurs with federal judges. And there are federal judges that are consistently trading in the equities of the companies that are in front of them. And so how can you how can you adjudicate a case, there was one judge that had 130 plus conflicts, trading conflicts, 130 plus, and he is the one that's there where at&t or Facebook or Google has an issue. I mean, how can you actually assume that these folks are being impartial if that's the case, and there are no consequences for this. And yet, you know, if you're again, going back to where we started, somebody in the arena trying to do something, you just got to think to yourself, like you have critics that are bashing you, you have folks that are basically flouting the law because they can. And then you put these two together. And it's like, this is so it's kind of depressing, to be honest with you, you start to be honest. I mean, this these politicians are
SPEAKER_04: grifters. That's it. And full stop. I mean, they're just grifting. And I mean, except for apparently, except for Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, they should just buy the companies they hate. Why aren't they buying Amazon and Tesla, they would be total proponents of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk if they did. Yeah, in fairness to Warren, I've seen her tweet that she
SPEAKER_01: supports the banning of the insider trading by congressional representatives, but I don't exactly see her fighting for it. You know, as hard as she's denouncing people like Elon. So look, I mean, it's it's characteristic of elected officials that they, what is it they see the splinter, you know, in somebody, you know, in somebody else's eye, but not the the log in their own or something like that. Isn't that the expression? But you know, who's taking advantage of this issue is Blake Masters, who's running for the Senate in Arizona just tweeted about that this would be the first thing he would fix if he gets elected, which is to ban insider trading by elected officials. And I think it's remarkable that, you know, politicians as shrewd as Nancy Pelosi are deceiving this issue to Republicans. I mean, I don't know why Republicans wouldn't make this a major plank of their platform for 2022. Nancy Pelosi is I think, the third or fourth richest person
SPEAKER_03: in Congress. Her husband is a very sophisticated private equity investor. There are these meme stocks that follow Nancy Pelosi's stock trading account or pretend to that were, you know, recently, by the way, banned by Twitter, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: That was weird. Yeah, protecting her, protecting her effectively.
SPEAKER_03: So you know, she has an incentive to not her seat of power is not necessarily the salary that she earns by being house leader, but it's by translating that in a bunch of different ways. And one way apparently, it turns out, is being an active equity investor in the market. It's unbelievable
SPEAKER_01: that's allowed. I don't know how this isn't just like an A plus fantastic issue for Republicans. They should make it an absolute plank of their platform. Here we go. Florida Republican Brian
SPEAKER_04: Mast was late in disclosure disclosing purchase of up to 100,000 in stock in an aerospace company, which had just testified before our committee he sets Kentucky Republican Rand Paul was 16 months late disclosing that he bought his wife bought stock in a pharma company that manufactures an antiviral COVID 19 treatment, right? Nevada Democrat Susie Lee failed to probably disclose more than 200 trades. Yeah, just as much as 3 million. I mean, this is just very clear. The violations have
SPEAKER_01: been on both sides of the aisle. I'm not at all trying to say that Republicans are better on this than Democrats. This is good. This is good bipartisan cooperation. Yeah, yeah,
SPEAKER_01: exactly. I mean, it's ridiculous. This is the political class in Washington behavior, but but but the difference is this, which is that Pelosi, the only leader of a party I've heard defend this is Pelosi. And I think this is a fantastic issue for outsider candidates, really on both sides to run on. This is also something that Biden can take
SPEAKER_03: because Biden has never tried to do this stuff. You know, my god, Biden's got so many shady dealings and
SPEAKER_01: selling paintings to China.
SPEAKER_04: Rich Biden's out there. Apparently, he's got a rich
SPEAKER_01: brother. He's got a lot of money. No, maybe that's true. But Joe Biden has been really down the
SPEAKER_03: middle. Come on. Be fair. Hunter's brilliant. I mean, he's selling paintings.
SPEAKER_04: Yeah, but why are they buying hundred Biden paintings for
SPEAKER_01: 500? $1,000?
SPEAKER_04: Well, I mean, he's a great artist. And why do people buy? I don't know if you saw Melania is coming out with NFTs today. So she's okay. Everybody's securing the bag now. I mean, if and by the way, the presidential grift is always the best just as a case in point. Trump's SPAC is worth over 2 billion. And
SPEAKER_04: BuzzFeed, which makes 360 million a year and I think has 102 million cash. He's not an office.
SPEAKER_01: That's misstated. Jason Trump's back his shares that he's going
SPEAKER_02: to be receiving are worth close to 20 billion. That's 20 billion. But he's not an office anymore. So I'm not sure
SPEAKER_01: the shares he's gonna receive. Oh, yeah, what you're counting
SPEAKER_02: is the market cap of the cash and trust the value of the shares that are already right. The Trump the value of the Trump entity is going to be closer to 20 billion. Oh, is that right? Wow, that's even crazier with no revenue.
SPEAKER_04: These poor media, right? Yeah. Well, the SEC apparently the DOJ sent a bunch of inquiries on this
SPEAKER_02: asking for background on the transaction. Because there's no business. There's no contracts. There's no employees. It's just the whole But by the way, I just just to make sure that everybody
SPEAKER_04: understands this isn't this is a bipartisan thing as well. The ultimate bag secures the Obama's got, I think, 50 million plus each for their book deals. And they got supposedly high eight figures like 50 6070 $80 million from now. Sorry, hold on a second. Hold on a second. When you said when you
SPEAKER_03: call them bag secures, I was really triggered there for a second. So am I supposed to take that offensively that you're saying Michelle Obama and Barack Obama secured the bag? Secure the bag is a term for getting the money. The Obama's
SPEAKER_04: are doing okay. So it's a thing. It's secure.
SPEAKER_01: We're not against everybody not being able to make money. The issue is trading on your office in a way that where you are trading on your insider information that your office is giving you or if you're selling influence, if you're still a book, if you sell a book when you're out of office, is that really a problem? No, I wanted to point out the Netflix one. What was Netflix's
SPEAKER_04: existential crisis for the eight years Obama was in office? And I remember. Nobody remembers net neutrality cares. Could they get would they have to pay Verizon? What was the Obama's position on net neutrality? They were for net neutrality. Netflix
SPEAKER_04: stock went up 4050 x under Obama, it could all be a coincidence. I'm just saying, what the fuck? So you're saying it's like you're saying it's a
SPEAKER_01: disguise lobbying payment to Obama? I think it's like, are
SPEAKER_04: you serious? I think it's like, I mean, listen, the Clintons were doing speaking gets for Goldman Sachs and half a million dollars. Kind of my cue to go to dinner now. Okay, here's the MRI. And
SPEAKER_01: you know, the main way that Winston Churchill supported himself was writing books. I think it's okay for politicians to write books. And if because ultimately, the public buys them and that's how they make money. What about when the book is 50
SPEAKER_04: million in the normal price for b 10? That's the problem. I
SPEAKER_01: mean, if I guess you might have a point if the advance was so in excess of the expected sales that it raises a question of what the remotives what I'm talking about, but I don't but is that is that what happens? Nobody gets paid a $50 million
SPEAKER_04: events. Nobody gets an eight figure. He was never made a documentary before. No, I mean, if this book sold 5 million
SPEAKER_04: copies, it still wouldn't be worth it. Let's move on to mRNA. So we keep our freed free birth factor.
SPEAKER_02: I'm so ready to go to dinner. Rick Thompson gave me a wonderful bottle of wine. By the way, I'm gonna go drink it tonight. I'm super tilted that you're you you like it's like, I mean,
SPEAKER_03: why is the Obama's Yeah, I can't do it.
SPEAKER_04: No fly zone for you super tilted. I mean, this is worse
SPEAKER_04: than sweater care. What what about Clinton's? Can I can I go after their 500? Hey, speaking gigs from Goldman Sachs? Yeah, that's okay. Yeah. Okay, fine. Just the Obama's. But
SPEAKER_01: Jason, are you are you doing exactly what Senator Karen did to Elon, which is by virtue of the fact that they're making money that you know, imputing evil motives to it. No, it's
SPEAKER_04: just a disproportionate to what they should get by your
SPEAKER_02: assessment. Their assessments the same about Elon. I pay a lot
SPEAKER_03: of money for Michelle Obama to do much of any I think she's just a good deal for somebody who's never made a film for
SPEAKER_04: Netflix. You said the same thing about Rivian. I don't know, man.
SPEAKER_02: You're projecting a little bit. I totally agree. This is on the second floor. I jump out the window right now. Yeah, you
SPEAKER_03: were let winners be winners. I think we should differentiate
SPEAKER_01: between insider trading. Sure. Bad and should not be allowed influence peddling bad should not be allowed. And somebody out of office make money. No, not monetizing their influence. And they did that. That's getting paid for services is getting paid to sell tickets or books. That's if that's fine. It's totally disproportionate. The reality is put it in. No, no, no, no,
SPEAKER_03: Jason, say you like the Obama's or I would vote Obama and for a
SPEAKER_04: third term. Okay. Didn't you get paid a $50,000 speaking fee
SPEAKER_02: recently to speak at a conference he did overpaid, overpaid, overpaid. You're worth $8. You're worth like $2,500.
SPEAKER_03: Who are you trying to influence? Who are they paying you to
SPEAKER_01: influence J Cal? I mean, honestly, Jake, I have no influence. Jason, Jason, you're like, like 30% less than a high
SPEAKER_03: end escort. Okay. No. Oh, man, that's there's a
SPEAKER_04: what's 30% more than 50 saying it's like 80 grand. And that's got her a 60 70 grand. I didn't realize that. Alright, talk to us about the mRNA news for cancer freebird that came out this past week. So I think the article that you
SPEAKER_02: guys sent around was one related to an oncology treatment that uses mRNA tech, but I think it's what I wanted to kind of what I thought would be interesting to talk about for a second is just zooming out on mRNA technology as a whole, which, you know, has been theorized for, you know, the the potential of it's been talking about for 50 years. If we talk about real quick what what RNA is, remember, your DNA, your genetic code, you know, defines the the printing of proteins in your cells. And so every three letters of DNA is an amino acid, a bunch of amino acids in a, in a row form a protein, and that protein has some function in your body. The way that the DNA gets translated into protein is through these mRNA snippets. So a little snippet of RNA is a copy of DNA, which floats over from the DNA strand, and it floats into what's called the ribosome and the ribosomes, the protein printer in the cell, and there's lots of ribosomes, and there's lots of RNA floating around all the time, and it's being copied over. So some chemical triggers the expression of that gene of that sequence of DNA into RNA that then turns into protein. And so chemical induces the protein, then the protein does something interesting. And the protein has a function in your body. And some of those proteins in human body can, you know, do bad things, and some of them can do good things. And so the idea has always been that we can actually use proteins as a way to modulate our health and modulate disease, for example, creating a protein that can attach to cancer cells and signal immune cells to come and kill those cancer cells as an example. And some people have genetic problems where their DNA prints the wrong protein, and then that protein is malformed or causes some harm to your health. And so the idea for RNA technology has always been that instead of having DNA be the source of truth for the proteins that get expressed in your body, can we stick RNA directly into cells and use that RNA to trigger the production of proteins that can do specific things in your body. And remember, the biggest segment of the pharma market or a huge segment of the pharma market is what's called biologic drugs, which are largely antibodies, which are a type of protein that have some specific function. But very many of these proteins are hard to get into the body and get them into the right place and get them to do the things we want them to do. So it'd be a lot easier if we could get RNA into the right cells to get those cells to make the right protein to do that thing that we want them to do. So everything from cancer treatment to genetic diseases, and there's RNA interference, and there's RNA, or what are called oligonucleotides that can be used to block specific bad proteins from being produced in your cells, or it's kind of another kind of course of treatment. So making proteins that we think are therapeutic, and blocking the production of bad proteins are kind of the mainstay of this idea behind RNA technology. And Moderna was started to pursue this effort out of flagship pioneering, which is an incubation shop in Boston. And they really kind of struggled for years to find the right footing of what's the right business model and the right product and the FDA kind of struggled with approving this stuff. And then boom, COVID hit. And when COVID hit, it was like, holy crap, let's accelerate this RNA technology, use it for vaccines, which had been in development for years. And the protein that's being produced is the same protein you find on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which triggers an immune response and builds up your immunity to that virus. And now the floodgates are open. And this is incredible, because the frontiers in RNA over the next decade, could change the course of how we treat disease, and change the course of, of outcomes for many diseases from genetic diseases all the way through to cancers. And so we're starting to see those floodgates open. I think there's now a few a handful of these, you know, RNA interference products that have been approved by the FDA. And we're now starting to see many more of these cancer and immunotherapy drugs start to get approved as RNA therapies. But it really, I think, was lit by, by the breakthrough with COVID. And everyone kind of seeing the benefit of this and the lack of side effects. And we've now got, I think, a validation in the market and acceptance from consumers that this technology could transform the industry in the same way that Genentech transformed the pharma industry with biologic drugs in the 80s and 90s. So it's super exciting. And you know, we can do updates regularly on our show, if you guys want to talk about more of the cool stuff that's coming out. But man, this is going to transform how medicine is delivered and the potential of things that we can kind of treat. Let me ask you a question
SPEAKER_04: would the if we looked at the total number of deaths from COVID, and then the potential debt, you know, debts avoided, or early deaths or more life days added, however you want to do it from mRNA and the impact on cancer over the next, say, 3040 years, in other words, the impact it would have on the people living today who live through COVID. Do you think net net, we'll see that the prevention of cancers through this new technology could actually make, you know, basically the silver lining to what happened during COVID. It's
SPEAKER_02: a good question. Let me give you the counterpoint in the late 90s, there was a gene editing clinical trial that took place. And they tried to an patient and they delivered the gene editing technology via virus. And so the virus goes in, it spreads around, and it has this this this molecule that would edit the gene and and it was for genetic disease. And a patient that they gave it to a young guy, got this, this virus and he actually died from it. And they shut down all clinical trials for years. And it was like, boom, that's the end. So there are a lot of scientists, a lot of doctors have argued for years that that particular case caused so many lives to be lost, because we lost years of progress and being able to run clinical trials during that time, and get drugs to market that could treat people. And you're right, maybe the opposite has happened here, that while these clinical trials may have taken years and years and years to get through in a normal setting, perhaps the pandemic was the accelerant we needed to get more of these to market faster and millions of people whose lives would have been lost, or would be lost otherwise to cancer and other genetic diseases and so on over the years to come, will be saved because these therapies will get to market faster. And so yeah, it's a it's a it's a great point. And maybe I don't know what the calculus is between the lives lost in the pandemic versus the lives gained via these treatments coming to market faster, but it's certainly a good way to think about it. The way to look at it, we look at the days of life lost, right?
SPEAKER_04: And if we actually could actually predict how long someone's gonna live, and that, you know, extension of life, I think we can come out of this ahead. Finally, on our docket, London breed calls for better policing in San Francisco after this insane surge in crime. Here's the video.
SPEAKER_00: It's time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city, it is time for it to come to an end. And it comes to an end, when we take the steps to be more aggressive with law enforcement, more aggressive with the changes in our policies, and less tolerant of all the bullshit that has destroyed our city, we are going to turn this around. This is a city that has a population of less than 1 million people with an over $12 billion budget. The residents of the city have been extremely generous in providing us with the resources we need to make a difference. And now the priorities we need to make must be to protect them must be to turn things around in their neighborhoods. When you are in a room full of people, I would say probably anywhere between 90 and 95% of folks could raise their hand and say that either their car has been broken into broken into, or they've been a victim in some capacity or another. That is not okay. That is not acceptable. Sax I thought crime was down, and that everything was great.
SPEAKER_04: And we were going to defund the police. What is happening here? What what's the big turnaround?
SPEAKER_01: Well, it's exactly what I was saying that, first of all, I loved it. I love what she said. It's exactly what I've been saying for the last year. And it's really great to hear her say the same types of things. I started this, this campaign back in January after New Year's Eve, you had those two women get killed by a repeat offender who was released by chaser Boudin. And then as I dug into it, I saw that he was doing this all the time as part of his agenda of decarceration. So and you know, a year later, like we've talked about throughout this this whole time, and the city is totally degenerated into some sort of dystopian Gotham like city. This did feel like the beginning of a Batman movie. I mean, it was a strong statement, I thought it was great. This is just the beginning of what needs to be done. I predict that London breed is going to eventually butt heads with chaser Boudin. There is no way that he will support this agenda of fixing the city she wants to increase the police presence. So like you said, she is going to refund the police, not defund the police. chaser Boudin is I mean, the only people he's passionate about prosecuting are police officers. Yeah. So we have a huge problem that the police department is actually we have too few of them. We're understaffed would take that job. It's not just because of budgets, also because they're demoralized. And they've got, you know, they've got this prosecutor. By the way, there was a case just recently, where a repeat offender bashed a vodka ball over the head of a cop. And the chaser just announced that he's getting sentimental health diversion, instead of being prosecuted. I want to what you can a cop and not go to jail in the city of
SPEAKER_04: San Francisco. Yes, this is why the cops are demoralized. So in
SPEAKER_01: order for London breed to fix the problem she is going and I think she's got here. He's got to go. So here's my prediction. On February 15, they are having the recall election for the education board. And I predict that that board at least two of the three are going to be recalled. The parents are sick and tired of it. They are going to be out. I think that's going to embolden London breed to then support the recall of chaser Boudin in the June election. And and I think between the pick is replacement. Yes, exactly. So that's what she's doing. She
SPEAKER_04: basically flipped. She was quiet up until this point. And she left are slowly eating themselves. Yeah, I mean, I
SPEAKER_03: think this is self preservation, right? Shemah. I mean, if she
SPEAKER_04: didn't make a change here, she's going to be out of office to she'll get recalled. It's not self preservation. They're realizing that these policies don't work. Moral absolutism
SPEAKER_03: didn't work on the left or the right. These guys have tried in a small scale to do what a certain fraction of the Democratic Party has been trying to do at a national level. It doesn't work. overspending under policing under educating. It doesn't do anything there. I think there's going to be a schism. I think it started after the young can victory in
SPEAKER_01: Virginia. And I think it's going to accelerate throughout for the next year. And especially after the red wave in November 2022. There's going to be a schism between liberal pragmatists and these extreme radical progressives. I think London breed represents. She's obviously very conservative. She's very liberal. She's very conservative. She's obviously very liberal. But I think she's pragmatic. I think she wants to find solutions that work. Whereas Jason Boudin is a radical ideologue who will never change no much no matter how much evidence is presented to him those policies don't work.
SPEAKER_02: I think there's a simple formula, the person who gets you into the mess is likely not the right person to get you out of the mess. And well said, you know, she she talks about San Francisco having a $12 billion a year budget. Can you guys imagine if she was the CEO of a tech company that had $12 billion a year in opex, and she ran the business into the ground? Would the board say go ahead, turn it around? Absolutely not. The board would step in. And in this case, the board is the citizens of San Francisco. And they would say, let's find the right person to turn this thing around. And while she stood up and said the right things, and maybe it would echo and I think, you know, even if it echoes within David Sachs, his heart, I'm sure it's echoing in a lot of hearts of more Franciscans. But I think that the apathy, being asleep at the wheel, and allowing the disorganization across the departments within that city is ultimately her responsibility. And I don't think that any amount of, you know, verbiage or action she might take at this point, justifies the damage she has caused while being the leader of that city. And I think that you'll and by the way, I think you'll see to Saks's point earlier, I think you'll see the same response across the nation, where folks feel like the leaders that got them into the mess that they're in locally in cities and elsewhere around this country, are going to vote those folks out of office. Because they want to change. And it's the same reason we saw folks vote Trump into office. And the same reason we saw folks vote Trump out of office. The more you want to see a change, the more you're going to make a change with your political right. Friedberg is so so right, there is a phenomenal Twitter
SPEAKER_03: account. And his name is Rob Henderson. And he's like a PhD student right now. I think he's in Europe on scholarship. You know, he's this, this, this, this guy has an incredible background, which you can talk about later. But Rob Henderson has this thing, which I love, which is that, you know, a lot of this stuff is born out of what he calls luxury beliefs, right? Like defunding the police is a luxury belief. If you're like this rich, middle class cloistered person that can sit behind a gate have armed security, yada, yada, yada, because you're not living in the ghetto where the byproducts of the byproduct of defunding the police are born out or decarceration are born out. Or you know, if you send your kid to a private school, you can completely be for all these crazy radical ideas like defunding, you know, advanced placement, defunding the gifted program, because if your kid's smart, you'll just pay for a tutor and you can do whatever you want. Those luxury beliefs exist more in the progressive left in such a small cohort of people than in any other political class that we have in America. And when they get a hold of power, they've now had the right to show whether those luxury beliefs can actually work. The data says it doesn't.
SPEAKER_04: Okay, with competence. I mean, how about that, like just keep people safe and make the education luxury beliefs belong
SPEAKER_03: in sociology, sociology textbooks in anthropological articles. They they they're they're better off and like we're beat Nick smoke pot and talk about it over a glass of wine.
SPEAKER_01: Let me clean up something just look I have no special desire to defend London breed. I'm sure there are many. I'm sure there are many better. breed brand sweater.
SPEAKER_04: London breed. I'm sorry. I'm for top for top for top for top for. Look, I'm sure there are better mayors but just I think
SPEAKER_01: I think we have to sort of temper what you said based on the realities of politics in San Francisco which are which are this we actually have a weak mayor the mayor can't do anything. Yeah, without the boat, the board of supervisors, and the soups are controlled right now by a bunch of crazies was basically allies, Dean Preston and Matt Haney, Hillary Roman, who are who are allies of Chasabudine. Okay, so London breed, I think wants to do some good things. I think that she is more pragmatic than these ideologues. I think that she could have been more aggressive and more outspoken about standing up to them. However, earlier, okay, but I think she is now doing the right thing in terms of the speech she just gave, basically calling for refunding the police, and we're sick of the bullshit and we're going to take action. Those are the right things to be saying right now. She did the right thing in terms of supporting the recall of the school board. And what I'm saying is, let's give her a chance to see if she does come out 100% percent of the recall of Chasabudine because I think that's where it's headed. And if she gets on board with that, and she shows she's pragmatic, she may actually survive.
SPEAKER_04: If she gets out, it's happening all around the country, right?
SPEAKER_03: We saw Bill de Blasio, who was the first real progressive leftist elected to a major city completely ran New York City into the ground. Now Eric Adams is going to go clean it up. Right. We had Glenn Youngkin, who basically ran a centrist campaign takeover, Virginia. It's over. It's over john, let's call it it's over. Centrism pragmatism enough of these extreme polar opposites. Okay, right. Let let antifa and the proud boys go and make love to each other and some deserted island. It's over. It's done.
SPEAKER_04: Somebody said to me, like proud boys. And what's the other group? Oath keepers or something? They this woman who's gay? She's like, Oh, you know, it was Rachel Maddow. She's like, I think these are like gay activist groups, aren't they like, proud boys? It sounds like a gay activist group.
SPEAKER_01: I think we're seeing the the correction of the overreaction the pandemic cause what Neil Ferguson calls pandemic politics that we that the pandemic bred a strain of radical politics that we saw all over the country. And I think on both sides. And I think the country is going to come out of that. Did you see
SPEAKER_04: these idiots go to Cheesecake Factory and do a sit in without their masks on? And that's their form of protest is like, we're going to go into the Cheesecake Factory talking about it was a Cheesecake Factory protest. And now it's going national with people who are anti mask anti vax. They're don't want to have to show their cards or wear a mask when they walk to their seat. So they're literally doing sit ins at Cheesecake Factory. I was like, I would protest going to a Cheesecake Factory. I'm not gonna protest in a Cheesecake Factory. Well, some
SPEAKER_01: people aren't on a diet like you Jake on they enjoy cheesecake.
SPEAKER_04: Well, where are you at? What's the number? Just give us the number? What's your way around 170? I'm 174. So I'm right. I'm coming right up behind you. You hear the steps you get the saxy saxy. I'm gonna tell you, bro. I love your sweater. I'm
SPEAKER_03: gonna drive to the city come to the mausoleum and make love to you with that sweater. Oh, my God. All right, everybody. We'll
SPEAKER_04: see you next week on the podcast. Love you besties. Love you, Sax. Sax. Back at you. Rain Man David Sax. We open source
SPEAKER_03: play a dog. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge door because it's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release. You're a bee. We need to get merges.
